Image Gallery

The Lust and Indulgence of Terry Rodgers

'In my work, I attempt to reflect my sense of the times we are living in, and both how richly interesting they are and how difficult it is for most of us to navigate their uncharted waters. There is a great push and pull, the lure and the repulsion, the fiction and the real, the known and the unknown. And we live in this swirl of delicate gestures, driving desires, fantasy, economic complexity and interdependence, hierarchical separations, isolation and hope. I am trying to render some notion of this rich fabric.

Each of my inventions is replete with specifics—body parts, expressions, psychologies, ironies, this profusion of luxurious details and a complex pictorial architecture in combination with frustrated and sublimated desires makes for a curious, static combustion in my work. They are a kaleidoscope of western culture's dream-world, seen through the body, colliding with loneliness and yet suffused with an infinitely regenerative power. The images may look real. But, of course, they aren't—neither are the constructions that inhabit our minds nor the language with which we interpret our world.

One of the things I'm trying to get at is the pure complexity of our world. One aspect of this complexity is the super-mediated nature of our experience. Another focus in my work, is that in the midst of all the complexity, there is incredible isolation, longing and hope. But this work is also about the viewer—how we interpret and react to what we see, and how our own lenses determine our perceptions. We might just be subjected to the myth-making machinery of our minds.

Importantly, however, is that nothing I create is meant to judge or criticize. I am merely looking closely at who we are, the density of influences upon us, the choices we make, and the recognitions that occur in trying to comprehend a universe with no signposts.' —Terry Rodgers